Upcoming WordPress version : Gutenberg

One of the Wordcamp workshops talked about the next version of WordPress called Gutenberg. Luckily they said the themes will still work in the new WordPress 5.0. Themes built for Gutenberg will have more functionalities, though. One of the cool things is that we will have richer page formatting abilities built in– for example, tables and columns. Right now, we can get tables and columns with either using a widget, doing html directly, or css scripting. Widgets, shortcodes, CSS scripting and menus will eventually be replaced by something called Native Blocks to make things easier and more consistent.

If you want to be one of the beta testers for WordPress Gutenberg, right now they are running three usability tests and would like people to check it out and report on it. Just go to Gutenberg Testing on WordPress.org. The test involves a Gutenberg editor plug-in that you download and add.

In the header of WordPress.org, you can download the WordPress software directly to your hard drive and test the plug-in that way, not on your up-and-running blog. One criteria is you need to know how to do a screen recording. They just want an accounting of which test you ran and if there were any problems — they don’t want suggestions for fixes because right now they are collecting data on any glitches. Suggestions is a different phase.

I am thinking of checking it out as I’m curious about what might be the upcoming changes. If they mentioned a timeline on release, I didn’t hear it.